preview- it's 2012 already-part 5

preview- it's 2012 already

fiction
edward w pritchard

It's hard for me to criticize the State of Tennessee or more specifically the City of Nashville. Both have been exemplary in remaining hospitable to the influx of refugees from Northern States, mine of Ohio included. In the catastrophe to civil order following the bad air plaguing Northern States to date, and slowly drifting South across America; Tennessee is being kind and welcoming to us refugees.

Several States, Texas and Arizona leading the charge, have sealed their borders. More moderate States will let in their fellow Americans, providing they do not have health insurance, mandating coverage in their State under Federal law. Those States fear the collapse of economic union.

I took Laura to the airport in Nashville. After she safely was on a plane to Chile and her new life I witnessed what is probably the new normal for Southern cities. I shudder to contemplate what we have become.

A desperate man at the airport refused to be convinced that his airline frequent flying credits, painstakingly acquired over a dozen years, had become worthless in the last month. As he became violent, I watched part of an incident of him being initiated to the newest generation of DNA tasers. The technology usually reserved for our foreign enemies, often called terrorists, by our military is painful and long remembered. The invasive orally delivered technology is apparently now in use in US cities because of the threat of civil disobedience caused by the new normal of the bad air epidemic and the movement of peoples South it has usher in. I was unable to watch longer as he was overpowered by five security persons and the tentacled device was rolled toward him down the sloping airport concourse.
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